Deadpool & Wolverine
Studio-endorsed anarchy is no anarchy at all.
Wade Wilson, a.k.a Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), is a self-aware superhero with an amoral outlook on life and the ability to regenerate his body from any sickness or injury. In the comics, he knows he’s in a comic book; in the Deadpool movies, he knows he’s in a comic book movie. He occasionally shares his awareness with the audience by addressing us directly, often by making metatextual references to ideas that exist outside his own movie. In one bit of dialogue early on, Deadpool himself explains why Deadpool & Wolverine exists in the first place (the Disney/Fox merger allowed the filmmakers to include characters that previously belonged to two separate corporations) and why the movie took so long to reach theaters (the IP rights had to be detangled in court).
Deadpool relishes his own self-awareness. He’s happy to quip about Ryan Reynolds’s real-life marriage to Blake Lively or taunt the nerds in the audience about the next fight scene they’re about to see. The script—and by extension the character—revels in irony, which is mined partly from the meta elements of the dialogue and partly from a commitment to being incredibly gory. The violence in most superhero movies is sanitized to the point that none of it feels real. Deadpool takes that same violence and festoons it with ribbons of bright red blood—still cartoony, with an aesthetic flourish that gives the appearance of more graphic violence without actually picturing most of the bodily consequences. We’re more knowing about the violence than those other MCU entries, the movie seems to say, and the tone reflects a sort of smugness that this movie is more adult because it isn’t afraid of blood. The glib tone and the veneer of gore still feels fake: a childish, callous approach that undercuts its own seriousness.
The Deadpool movies have always been gleefully, loudly crass. Sometimes it’s refreshing to hear a movie say the quiet part out loud; Lord knows I’ve laughed at a number of the jokes across the franchise. Ryan Reynolds has a solid sense of comedic timing, and the film manages to weave in references to Marvel lore without bogging itself down in those details, an impressive feat for an entry in a cinematic universe nearly three dozen movies long. This one’s for the fans, specifically the ones who like to iterate on existing stories, to ask themselves and others, “What if?”
Deadpool & Wolverine’s “what if?” flirts with making fun of fan culture, but never manages to commit to a full-throated critique, let alone an engaging commentary. Deadpool comments several times to the audience that we’re about to watch a fight scene between characters that, until now, have been separated from each other on the silver screen because of the different corporations who hold the rights to those characters. He’s gleeful because these characters’ meeting has been officially denied to us, except in speculative conversations on the internet. But references to copyright law simply aren’t interesting when they just happen to be reminders that one company holds all the rights now; jokes about how Hugh Jackman will be playing Wolverine until he’s ninety come across as both an indictment of the MCU’s structure and as corporate gloating, a joke written by a sore winner.
It’s unclear just how much Hugh Jackman is in on the joke. He’s played a worn-out, self-doubting version of Wolverine in past movies, so his played-straight performance as a self-loathing version of the character from a crummy alternate universe (“the worst Wolverine,” according to Deadpool) comes across as a sad copy of a stronger concept. The film feints toward themes of being worthy despite feeling worthless, but this is disingenuous, given that Deadpool and especially Wolverine are two of the most popular superheroes of all time, at least within the bounds of Marvel Comics.
It should be fun to take a character and plop them into an alternate universe, to explore what makes them tick within the rules of a slightly different setting and genre. This iterative creativity is part of what makes fanfiction so powerful. The point of fanfiction is to tell a story beyond the bounds of copyright, to break the rules a little, to push a character further out of the author’s control and into a world of possibility. Deadpool & Wolverine wants to break the rules too, but its violence, crassness, and self-commentary are all sanctioned by the production company. The movie is ironically self-aware, not earnestly self-aware; it’s incapable of any true critique because it wants to have its cake and eat it too. The really annoying thing is that the self-reflection doesn’t even matter: this is a version of Deadpool from an alternate universe, so if the movie does poorly at the box office, anything that happens here can be handwaved away as an offshoot version with no real consequences. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★☆☆☆
Deadpool & Wolverine is in theaters now.